GNU

The GNU Project3.1 was begun in 1984 by Richard Stallman of MIT
with the aim to develop a complete free (meaning free for everyone to
look at, to learn from, and to build upon) software operating system.
In 1989 he codified the terms under which this free software was
released, producing the GNU Public License (GPL) which is the basis on
which much of the GNU/Linux operating system is released. The license
is often referred to as the copyleft license in contrast to
the restrictive practise of copyright.

By 1991 when Linus Torvalds wrote his Linux kernel GNU provided the
operating system. By combining the GNU operating system with the Linux
kernel the seeds for this most popular free operating system were
sown.

Many users installed the GNU tools on many different computers as
replacements for vendor supplied tools. This provided these users with
a consistency across the many different platforms they used. The
tools even eventually appeared under MS/Windows, providing a
Unix-like environment on a very different operating
system.3.2

The tools developed by the GNU project include such essential
utilities as the GNU file management utilities and the GNU text file
processing utilities. The GNU file management utilities include
fundamental command line tools like ls (to list information
about files/documents), mkdir (to create new
directories/folders), mv (to move directories and files
around), rm (to remove files), and many more. The GNU text
file processing commands include cat (to concatenate files
together), head (to preview the top few lines of a file),
sort (to sort the contents of a file), and wc
(to count the number of lines, words, and bytes in a file).

The Bourne Again SHell is compatible with the
traditional Unix sh and offers many extensions found in
csh and ksh. It is similar in concept to DOS.

binutils

Consists of programs used to assemble, link, and
manipulate binary and object files. It is used in conjunction with a
compiler and various libraries to build programs for Linux.

chess

A state-of-the-art chess-playing program.

cvs

The Concurrent Versioning System used for version control
and management of software projects.

emacs

An extensible, customisable real-time display
editor and computing environment. This editor is widely used by
developers and is more than just an editor. Emacs is capable of
reading email, of providing integrated development environments, and
spreadsheets, to name just a few.